


Someone Else

by unlikelyvalentines (reegars)



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Drug Use, Suicide Attempt, alcohol use, seriously this is suicide TW stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-06 01:50:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5398316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reegars/pseuds/unlikelyvalentines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Deacon affinity and Railroad plot spoilers)  After losing Barbara, Deacon leaves the Commonwealth to either start over or end his life. He's not sure which, until he meets a stranger who's been on his trail and looking for his help. </p>
<p>Or maybe, it's just another one of his lies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone Else

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a bit of an experimental piece... just an idea I had stuck in my head. Obviously it's not for everyone and I'm not sure I'd consider it as my "canon" or anyone else's, but it's an idea to toss around. I mostly had him go to the Captial just for my own reasons for a separate fic I'm writing, but I'm too lazy to change it now. Enjoy xx

He walked with purpose. This was not the Commonwealth. There was not a familiar face in sight. A stranger himself in caravan rags, dirt smeared on his tired face, he could hardly recognize himself in the broken windows of buildings he passed. He hadn’t had so much purpose in weeks. Here to start over. Here to begin his ending. 

Barbara had been his undoing. Every moment he didn’t have his hands cradling a gun, he could only dwell on his hands cradling her broken neck. Barbara. His everything. His wife, the synth. Til death do us part, he found himself repeating, a broken laugh always stuck at the top of his throat. It had done them part. And soon, it would put them back together. 

He wasn’t sure why he’d walked all the way to the Capital Wasteland just to kill himself. He had been hoping that maybe the month long walk would serve as a purge to everything stuck in his mind and on his hands. If he waded through enough irradiated water, maybe all that blood could wash from his skin. If he spent enough time on the cracked pavement, sun beating down on him til he felt faint, maybe he could become someone new. That would be something. Enough radiation and heat poisoning that he could forget who he was. 

Because, if he was being honest, he was terrified of death. 

He had stood there over the last corpses of the Deathclaws, the men he had once considered his friends before things had gotten so out of hand, and held his pistol to his chin. An eternity passed. Then another. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t do it. So afraid of failure. So afraid of judgement day coming too soon. 

Or, maybe, it had already passed. Everything after the bombs was just an epilogue to the Earth’s terrible existence. If God had ever been, He was no longer. What did he have to be afraid of? And yet, the pull of the trigger never came. He would carry that. 

And so, after holding her for a long night, he buried Barbara under the tree they had lynched her in. He left everything he owned, taking only a few weapons, some food, and enough water to last a week. Maybe he would just collapse from the dehydration. Maybe he’d be Deathclaw chow. Maybe he’d make it to the Capital and fall down at the doors of Rivet City, and they’d shoot him on sight for trespassing. All he knew was that he couldn’t pull the trigger himself, so he had to put himself in harm’s way. 

And now, he walked along the water’s edge in the ruins of a city he’d never seen before, wondering how he had even managed to make it there. It shouldn’t have been so hard to die, considering the opportunities were limitless. Perhaps he’d grown so accustomed to avoiding death that throwing himself bare before it was now impossible. And he hated himself for it. 

He felt eyes watching him from behind. An unmistakable feeling. He turned, wondering why his hand even bothered to graze the pistol at his hip. He’d been getting the paranoid feeling of being watched ever since he had left the Commonwealth. Probably just the hunger and dehydration, combined with the trauma. It was no wonder he was paranoid. Borderline delusional, soon. He turned and kept walking, finally able to see the tall rusted ship that comprised Rivet City. Everything felt like a dream. Maybe he’d been killed by the Deathclaws, too. Maybe he was in Hell, doomed to walk the wasted earth as a ghost, having paranoid delusions of his wife following him in the shadows. He almost laughed to himself. You’re losing it. 

It was already lost. 

When he arrived at the doors of Rivet City, the guards only hassled him until he pulled out the caps he had stashed away for just this occasion. Knowing that he could bring some form of revenue and consumption to the settlement’s economy, they let him pass. He rented a small room, got a hot meal, and even bathed. He was almost okay for a moment, until he wiped the fog from the dirty bathroom mirror and saw his face, same as always, staring back. When he blinked, blood. The silence was full of her choking, noosed in a tree that he was no longer 500 miles away from. Gripping the cracked porcelain sink, he vomited, reeling from the memories once again. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be anywhere. He didn’t want to be. 

He stumbled out of the rented room and back down to the marketplace, where he bought as many chems and bottles of booze he could find between the traders there. Even the chem dealer gave him a worried look when he handed over his caps, eyes bloodshot, breathing labored. “You alright, buddy?” she had asked. He only walked away. 

He drank until he couldn’t remember anything. He took hits of Jet until the world stood still. He slept, he woke in a sweat, he vomited again, and repeated the entire process once more. 

He wasn’t sure if hours or days had passed, and he didn’t care. When he wandered out of his room in a drunken stupor, he bumped into a woman walking down the hall. Her hair fell in neat red ringlets that framed her pale face. A cigarette was lit between her parted lips. “I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm. “Are you alright?” 

He recoiled at the brush of her skin, brow furrowed as he looked from her face to her hand. There was something about her. Someone he had seen before. Without a word of acknowledgement, he stumbled past her and down the stairs to the marketplace. 

Time passed and his supply of caps was running low. He came down from his last high and finished his last bottle, slept it off, had a hot meal once again, and tried his hardest to look in the mirror. This time, he didn’t vomit. He only cried. Nothing was working. No matter what he did, the thoughts only got worse. He relived the empty look on his wife’s cold face over and over. Synthetic. Had nothing about her been real? All the things she’d said, lies? Her love? Her touch? Every damn moment, synthetic. This whole fucking existence, just some test tube man-made connection of wires and electricity? The tears kept coming and he hated himself for it. He hated himself, more in that moment than he ever had and ever would. He hated himself for participating in the lynching of someone who might not have even been a synth. He hated himself for not preventing it for his wife. 

He hated himself because, if he had really tried, he could have stopped them from killing her. 

But he had frozen in panic at their accusations. Barbara, a synth? Was it true? Some sick, small part of him wanted to know. He was a good enough shot. He could have taken the two in the tree out with minimal error. His gun was right at his side. He could have saved her life, and he chose not to. The worst part of it was, for the life of him, he didn’t know why he didn’t do something. Anything. 

This had all been preventable. 

None of this would had happened had he just not gotten attached. Had he eked out a living on his own. He had never deserved a woman like her, synth or not. He had never deserved shit. 

He stared at himself in the filthy glass, eyes sagging and red, face dirty and cracked from the harsh wasteland days and nights, tears leaving clean tracks through the filth. It was over. How could he live with himself after he’d done so much terrible to the world? To innocent people? To his wife? 

He slipped out of his room and crept to the empty southern stairwell, knowing the guards didn’t bother spending much time there as they were more concerned about break ins in the labs and marketplace during the night. He reached the roof access door and started to pick the lock, nearly in tears as he broke three bobby pins before finally getting it. He walked out to the edge of the ship’s structure and looked down at the rocks at the water’s edge, stories and stories below. 

“I’m sorry, alright?” he laughed through his tears, talking to everyone, talking to no one. Talking directly to his wife, who he could still feel watching over his shoulder. He hated it. It made his skin crawl. “I tried. Or maybe I fucking didn’t. I don’t know. I’m so afraid. I’m not cut out for this bullshit world.” He couldn’t help but think about all the Old World books he’d read. Had life really been so simple? So peaceful? Was the afterlife like that? 

Did synths go to heaven? Would he? 

“I don’t have a choice. I can’t do this. I thought coming here could be a new start, but it’s just made everything worse. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He felt crazy talking to himself. But then again, he was about to throw himself from the roof of Rivet City. He had to be crazy. He’d lost his mind. “I failed. I can’t fix this.” 

“Excuse me.” A soft voice came from behind him, familiar and feminine. It scared him enough to prematurely send him flying off the roof. He jumped and went to turn, nearly losing his balance. “No!” the woman cried, reaching a hand out, but she was too far to grab him. Luckily, he regained his footing and stood facing her, trying to wipe away his tears with pride intact. Not that there was much at all to salvage. 

He frowned. It was the woman from the hallway before. This wasn’t part of the plan. “Who are you? What do you want?” 

“My name is Desdemona. I’m with the Commonwealth chapter of the Railroad. I wanted to know if you wanted to talk about a proposal I have for you.” 

He could have laughed. About to commit suicide and she was trying to sell him something. “I’m a little busy at the moment, as I think you can tell…” 

“I’m very sorry about your wife. We were aware of the U.P. Deathclaws’ presence in the Commonwealth, but didn’t know that they were still actively seeking to engage in such violence. I know this has been a lot on you, but—”

He took a step towards her, and away from the ledge. “How the fuck do you know about any of that?” 

“We are an organization that seeks to secure the safety and wellbeing of Institute-escaped synths and ‘rejects’ in the Commonwealth… When we got word about the Deathclaws’ latest murder, we thought we would reach out to you. But immediately after was obviously an inappropriate time, and you left so soon. I would have done it sooner, but I had to catch up to you when we had learned you left for the Capital.”

“You followed me….all the way here….. To what? To ask me to join your club? To help the other synths when I couldn’t even save my wife’s life?” He couldn’t believe this was happening. Every cell in his body was screaming to be thrown from the roof. But his fear, and this woman, stopped him. 

“No, I was coming down here on business anyway. I just moved the trip up in a hurry when I found your house empty with a note for whoever came to find the Claws that you were ‘DOA at the Capital anyway’. You could be an asset to our team.” She took a step forward. “This is a chance to start over. This is a chance to do something good for the Commonwealth. I’ve seen how you operate. You have excellent survivalist skills, and you’re a master of stealth. That’s the two assets I need the most right now.” 

“I can’t believe this is happening.” He laughed, feeling psychotic. “I can’t believe this. Where were you when she needed you?”

“I’m truly sorry that we were too late. I can’t believe that we missed any intel that would have pointed us to her. Had we known, we would have put a stop to them before they started. But this is your chance to avenge for that loss.” 

“I already have all the revenge I need. I have enough blood on my hands.” He looked out at the water, watching the moon’s rippling reflection through the irradiated fog that covered the earth. 

“Stay. Just one more night. Think about my offer. If you don’t want to join me? Go ahead. The roof is yours. Just think about what you really want.” 

“Why shouldn’t I just do this now?” Was he asking her, or looking for an out? He felt so angry that he would even give himself the opportunity to back out of this. “I can’t even look at my face in the fucking mirror.” 

“I don’t think you want to be dead. I think you want to die, but you don’t want to be gone. You want to be someone else. You can be someone else.” 

At that exact moment, something clicked in his head. And she saw it. 

“One of the finest facial reconstructive surgeons works in this very city. We could get you a new face, on me. New clothes. A new name. It would take some time, but you could start over. And I mean, start all over.” 

It wasn’t such a bad idea.


End file.
